scholarly journals Breaking the Mirror: Alain Badiou’s Reading of Jacques Lacan

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Ndiaye Berankova
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Logical Impossibility

In this article, I focus on Alain Badiou’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Jacques Lacan and highlight his conceptual points of divergence with the psychoanalyst. I elaborate on Badiou’s distinction between philosophy, antiphilosophy, and sophistry as well as the notions of sense, ab-sense, and non-sense that he proposed in the book There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan as well as in his seminar on Lacan. Unlike Lacan, who affirmed that philosophy is subject to the fantasy of the One, Badiou claimed that the One exists merely as a result of an operation of counting. In this manner, he contested Lacan’s conviction that philosophy forecloses the real. I argue that Badiou’s main point of divergence with Lacan is centred on the notion of the subject and on the localization of the void in relation to the subject. I also touch upon philosophy’s relation to the symbolic, namely its ability to raise powerlessness to logical impossibility.

scholarly journals Mystical experience in the men of the cave: a Lacanian reading of al-Kahf

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 456-462
Author(s):  
Tayebeh Barati ◽  
Pyeaam Abbasi
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
The Real ◽  
Holy Quran ◽  
The Holy Quran ◽  
The Subject

In his contribution to psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan introduces three orders according to which every psychoanalytic phenomenon can be described. These three orders are the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The imaginary is the order in which the subject thinks of everything as his/her own. For the subject there is no distinction between the other and the subject itself. In the symbolic order the subject comes to realise that there is a gap between him/her and the other. S/he, then, starts to feel a lack which for the rest of his/her life the subject tries to fill in. The real is considered as the most important order in which the subject tears away from the symbolic and tries to experience, once again, the unity it had in the imaginary order. It is in this phase that the subject experiences what is known as jouissance or the 'pleasure in pain'. The present study tries to look at the eighteenth chapter of the Holy Quran, al-Kahf (The Cave), in the light of psychoanalysis studies and Lacan's theories in order to analyse the mystical experience that the Men of the Cave go through to reach their final jouissance. 

scholarly journals Urbanismo Colaborativo

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Moreno Balboa
Keyword(s):  
Living Conditions ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
Government Functions ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

¿Ha cambiado el concepto de ciudad en tan sólo 2400 años? Si la ciudad la componen los ciudadanos ¿son éstos distintos de los ciudadanos de las antiguas polis? Si el ciudadano es quien participa en las funciones de gobierno de su ciudad, ¿quién es ahora realmente, ciudadano? ¿Quién quiere serlo? y quién quisiera participar de dichas funciones, ¿cómo podría conseguirlo?En la sociedad actual se producen dos situaciones antagónicas que afectan al desarrollo de la ciudad, por un lado las administraciones, actuando orientadas al interés general, reconocen pero congelan las posibilidades de participar de la población en el urbanismo y la creación de ciudad; y por otro lado la sociedad se mueve y actúa al margen de las administraciones en la mejora de su entorno y sus condiciones de vida, desde las denominadas iniciativas urbanas. Cuáles son los motivos de esta situación y cómo hacer que ambos movimientos coincidan en la generación del denominado “Urbanismo Colaborativo”, es el objeto de este trabajo.AbstractHas the concept of city changed in only the past 2400 years? If the city is the one consisting the citizens, are these any different of the citizens ancient polis? If the citizen is one participating in his city’s government functions, who is the real citizen now a days? Who wants to be one? Who wants to participate in those functions? How could someone acomplish that?In today’s society, there are two antagonistic situations that are affecting the development of the city, on the one hand the administrations, acting orientated to the general interest, they recognize but freeze the possibilities that the citizens have of participating in urbanism and the creation of the city. And on the other hand, the society moves and acts outside of the administrations for the improvement of their environment and their living conditions, doing this from the named urban initiatives. What causes this situation and how to put together both movements and for them to agree in the generation of the named “Collaborative Urbanism” is the subject and what this study wants to acomplish.

scholarly journals A Lacanian supplementation to love in L’Immanence des vérités

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Park Youngjin
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Individual Difference ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
Difference Family ◽  
Lacanian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
The Real ◽  
The One ◽  
Central Claim

AbstractIn L’Immanence des vérités, Alain Badiou rewrites the Platonic allegory of the cave. As the book’s structure reveals, Badiou’s central claim is that truths are absolute, for they are constituted by the dialectic between finitude and infinity, the consequence of which lies in the creation of the œuvre. Although love is often affected by individual difference, family, money, and social norms, philosophy calls for a rupture with these instances of finitude, awakening us to the truth that love is open to the possibility of infinity embodied by contingent encounter, amorous declaration, and the faithful construction of the Two. Badiou calls for subjectivization of this possibility in the form of the amorous œuvre, through and beyond the Lacanian impasse of the sexual non-relationship. This article supplements Badiouian love with Lacanian psychoanalysis by developing five points. First, the binary framework “Lacanian finitude vs Badiouian infinity” can be misleading. Second, Badiou himself regards the unconscious and the analytic discourse as inscribed by the dialectic between finitude and infinity. Third, Lacan allows us to recognize that the œuvre and the waste are not opposed, but rather supplementary to each other. Fourth, for both Lacan and Badiou, love constitutes the interlacing of the non-relationship and the Two. Fifth, the Badiouian amorous absolute must deal with the real of the absolute as the fusional One and thus, can be supplemented by the Lacanian problematic of the sexual relationship in its fantasmatic form of the One. Based on these points, this article elaborates such concepts as the amorous labor, the dialectic between œuvre and waste, and the artisan of love.

scholarly journals Initiation of a Criminal Case: Unconditionally Abolish or Try to Understand the True Reasons for its Occurrence?

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 133-139
Author(s):  
S. B. Rossinskiy
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Case ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Entire System ◽  
The Real ◽  
Scientific Discussion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Made In

The paper deals with the problems that are the subject of longstanding scientific discussion, conducted in relation to the prospects of the stage of initiation of a criminal case as an independent stage of criminal procedural activity. Being a supporter of the principled elimination of the stage of initiating a criminal case, the author nevertheless believes that such a decision cannot be made in isolation from understanding the real reasons that prompted Soviet scientists to develop these mechanisms, and the legislator — to introduce them into the system of criminal procedural regulation. Based on the results of his previous research on the problems of pre-trial proceedings, the author believes that the emergence of the stage of initiation of a criminal case is directly related to the one that has been formed since the 1920s. The original Russian system of pre-trial proceedings that has survived to this day, expressed in the integration of the functions of the "police" and "justice" and in the vesting of the "power" ministries and departments with procedural powers of a judicial and investigative nature. In this regard, the author concludes that the question of the further fate of the stage of initiation of a criminal case can be finally resolved only in the context of a clear understanding of the prospects for the development of the entire system of Russian pre-trial proceedings.

scholarly journals Clothing, Law and the Institution of the Subject’s Internal Normativity

Pólemos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-61
Author(s):  
Isabelle Letellier
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Real Dimension ◽  
The Real ◽  
Structuralist Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject

Abstract Gender Studies have shown that gender is a social construct. In the paper, I argue that gender as a social construct should not hide its “Real” dimension: social constructs participate in what Lacan calls the Real. In this perspective, gender is conceived as a symptom built by the subject to protect itself against castration. The subject is therefore tied to its gender as it is tied to its symptom – in the psychoanalytical sense. It builds the image of gender in order to be able to enter in a relationship with the Other. In other words, the imaginarization of gender makes possible – paradoxically – for the subject to access the impossibility of a sexual relationship. Gender is therefore the result of the imaginarization of castration. Whereas the psychoanalytical reading has often been interpreted – especially in Gender Studies – through a structuralist view, I argue that the psychoanalytical approach to the construction of gender does not contradict its social determination. However, one may stress that social determination according to psychoanalysis cannot but be introduced by the symptom, that is by the subject itself and through the fantasied construction of its relationship with the Other. I suggest to read this psychoanalytical interpretation of gender with the notion of the institution as developed by Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s view of the institution is particularly relevant here for two reasons. First it overcomes the opposition between the subject and the social which are both instituted and instituting at the same time. Second, Lacan’s theory of sinthome which reads the symptom in terms of sexual relationship implicitly refers to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the institution. I will show to what extent the Merleau-Pontian notion of the institution helps to conceive of the Real in gender understood as an intertwining of social and subjective construct. I claim that this view overcomes both a structuralist approach – which represses the historicity of the social – and a view which represses the function of gender in the subject’s construction and its symptom.

scholarly journals Fun until the end: The nightclub fantasy in the Italian cinema of the economic miracle

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
Giorgio Mobili
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
The Real ◽  
Object A ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Capitalist Ideology

This article examines the use of the nightclub trope in three films from the early years of the Italian “economic miracle”: Luchino Visconti’s White Nights (1957), Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961). Availing myself of psychoanalytic theory, I discuss how, in these three films, the nightclub is deployed as a hermeneutic space that sheds light on the functioning of the then nascent ideology of consumption, specifically on the way it captures the subject through fantasy. Capitalism earns our allegiance by creating the illusion that the ontological lack that marks us as subjects is in fact only contingent, and thus remediable through the acquisition of an empirical object (a commodity) that might yield the total enjoyment we crave. In mainstream Hollywood cinema—the chief disseminator of the capitalist ideology—this illusion is mostly fostered through the fantasy of the successful sexual relationship (or romantic fantasy). Through the nightclub trope, Fellini, Visconti, and Antonioni deconstruct this fantasy by letting it unfold well past the point at which Hollywood endings would stop, until it inevitably unravels into an encounter with the Real: nothing but loss awaits us at the end of fantasy. Yet this traumatic moment is politically crucial: once we realize that the enjoyment we failed to attain was always already lost, we will be free from the capitalist injunction to consume and accumulate—from the crippling illusion that our happiness lies but one more purchase away.

Osip Mandelstam between Vecherniy Kiev and Leningrad’s Rezets (1927—1929) On the real-life sources of the poet’s verse and prose

2019 ◽  
pp. 309-367
Author(s):  
L. F. Katsis
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Search Method ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Real ◽  
Literary Journal ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Russian Association

The search method demonstrated in the discovery and examination of the new sources of O. Mandelstam’s poems and prose is the subject of this article. The author suggests consistent analysis of the mentions of Mandelstam and his works in the newspaper Vecherniy Kiev in the years from 1927 up to 1929. Among them is the poet’s name mentioned in the article by the Leningrad-based ideologist A. Stetsky, attacking the local literary journal Rezets. The study of the two publications reveals a number of real-life sources of the pivotal images in the poems Down the Streets of Kiev, the Viy... [Kak po ulitsam Kieva-Viya...], I’m not Quite a Patriarch Yet... [Eshcho dalyoko mne do patriarkha...], The Fourth Prose [Chetvyortaya proza], etc. More new sources are uncovered to explain the ties of Mandelstam and his works with D. Zaslavsky, I. Selvinsky, M. Tarlovsky, N. Ushakov, etc. A special emphasis is placed on the changing perception of Acmeism by the Leningrad bureau of RAPP [Russian Association of Proletarian Writers], as well as different perceptions of Mandelstam as an active Soviet writer, on the one hand, and àn acmeist, on the other. The study also looks into the roles played by K. Tokar and B. Rosenzveig (the editor and a contributor of Vecherniy Kiev, respectively) in the poet’s life, and discusses the episodes related to B. Lecache, whose novel Mandelstam was translating.

scholarly journals THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE-GUATTARI AND/OR LACAN (IN THE TIME OF CAPITALISM)?

Phronimon ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bert Olivier
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Ego Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Process Ontology ◽  
The Real ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
The One

This paper addresses the question, whether Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the human subject, as articulated in (mainly) Anti-Oedipus, is as irreconcilable with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical  theory of the subject as one might expect, given Anti-Oedipus’ attack on the “Oedipal” basis of psychoanalysis. The notion of the multiplicitous “subject”, as fleshed out in Anti-Oedipus, is reconstructed with the requisite attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of flows, desiring-machines, desiring-production, schizophrenia, the “body without organs” and the emergence of a “spectral” kind of subject. It is argued that the so-called “body without organs” may be read, in one sense, as their term for the concept of (ego-) identity, which is anathema to the dynamism of the process of desiring-production. For purposes of comparison, Lacan’s theory of the subject is briefly reconstructed as well in terms of the registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the “real”, with a view to uncovering those aspects of it that are compatible with Deleuze and Guattari’s ontological emphasis on process and becoming, instead of substance. Finally, the problem of the relation between capitalism, on the one hand, and Deleuze/Guattari’s process-ontology, as well as Lacan’s understanding of the discourse of capitalism, is addressed in light of the question of the subject of capitalism, and of the possibility of a critical understanding of capitalism. 

Introduction: The Mystery

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Philipp Reemtsma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
The Real ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

This introductory chapter reflects on the question often uttered by people when they hear of people doing reprehensible things, “How one earth….” It argues that we have always known that humans are capable of committing atrocities that leave us speechless. The real question, the one behind the screen, is: how is it possible that murderers became our “ordinary” fathers? The question is tortuous because it necessitates in us an excruciating ambivalence while confronting us with a set of unresolved moral issues. And it continues to do so despite the many real and fictionalized revolutions of 1968 and the innumerable attempts at literary reckoning with our fathers and grandfathers. The chapter also argues that the form of life we have taken to calling modernity not only ought not to have been compatible with the occurrence of violent excess in the twentieth century; once it did occur modernity at least ought to have perished as a result. Our persistent trust in modernity despite our knowledge that it is other than we presumed is the subject of this book.

scholarly journals Jacques Lacan’s Theory of Rupture: the Perspective of the Real

Problemos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 100 ◽  
pp. 100-113
Author(s):  
Kasparas Pocius
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Alternative Scenario ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The One

The article analyses Jacques Lacan’s theory of rupture that encompasses the three planes – the imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real – that comprise his topology. It is named the theory of rupture because it allows grasping the unfinished Lacanian subject as it encounters Other in all of those planes. The main question is whether this lack could be considered as positive. The attention is paid to the phallic signifier; the hypothesis is that this signifier, by linking the symbolic and the Real, allows the creation of new meanings and the resistance towards the fundamental fantasy.The Lacanian ternary conception of topology helps us to analyse the field of politics. While grasping this field from the “ex-sisting” perspective of the Real, we can observe the two scenarios of the development of (political) subject. On the one hand, there is a possible link between the subject and fantasy, in which one tries to compensate for the lack of the Real by “comforting” itself in the plane of symbolic discourse. On the other hand, in the alternative scenario, the subject consciously admits its lack, rejects the fantasy and begins to create new names which “hole” the symbolic discourse itself as well as the insufficiency of the symbolic field. The Real is defended by the phallic signifier, which helps to maintain the subject’s negativity and militancy. By enclosing the Real into the Symbolic we create the new consistency as the subject seeks not to maintain a passive form and place inside the structure, but names the positive lack in the structure itself and thereby creates the new political content.

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